I've had a growing interest in type design for about a year now, and this is perhaps my 4th attempt at a simple sans face. I just want to force myself to bring a project to completion, and produce a typeface that doesn't look too amateurish, even if it turns out very plain.

I was hoping for some feedback and suggestions about anything which you think stands out as needing some work. I'm still pretty new to this, but looking to learn—so please be kind!

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Please note, so far I've only been working on drawing the glyphs, and the metrics are just done automatically in Illustrator just now.

Also, please ignore the 'Pro' tag on the name and the MyFonts promo look; I was just playing around :)

Yeah, it's looking good. And applause for "the Lostry"; that must be one of the cleverest names I've seen.

"S" is leaning to the right.

Top of "f" looks a bit heavy and its curvature seems slightly out of place. Copying from "t" may serve better.

When I saw your "Q" I thought "Ah, what European country is he from, then?" Designers whose home language doesn't ordinarily use "Q" often seem to think of it as "O with line diacritic below." It's not wrong, but the disconnection is a little more stylized than readers of English usually expect in text. I think that more alternates are called for, and that the default should be like the first one but with a short vertical stroke to connect the existing shapes together.

Not bad. Agree with the comment on the Q. It looks nice in isolation but in context it doesn't really work for me.

The angle and length of the 'slash' on your Ø and ø is wrong. 60° is way too much. Bring it down to 45° at least, and don't let the line extend (optically) below baseline or above x-height, definitely not past the overshoot.

And take hrant's advice on moving to a font editor asap - you're creating work for yourself labouring in illustrator.

Firstly, thanks for the quick responses, I really appreciate the feedback.

Hrant: I tried to draw the double-storey g with a shorter descender, but it wasn't working for me—do you think that the double-storey g needs to descend less, or would it be sufficient to match it with the other descending letters?

Cerulean: I'm actually a native English speaker from the UK! When I drew the disconnected Q I was basically just trying to do something different from the Qs I had drawn in previous typefaces—and when I began I suppose I was aiming more at a display face than a text face (the proportions used to be much more classical, but they've evened out as time went on).

Hrant & Osamu: Actually, this is the first typeface where I opted to draw my glyphs in the font editor from the start; when I said that I was using Illustrator for the metrics, I just meant that I haven't spaced or kerned the font properly yet, and have been using the 'Optical Kerning' setting on Illustrator when making specimen text compositions like those I posted above.

Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll do some more work and then post some more images up after!

To me the binocular "g" is the first (and often only) glyph that has to look a bit ungainly (in terms of being vertically squooshed, and appearing slightly too small) for something much more important –namely good vertical proportions– not to go out of whack. Normally this applies to text faces, while this design is more in the display realm... which makes me think you might be better off with a monocular "g". But if you stick with a binocular one try making the bottom open (like in Meta).